John Gallagher: After Techonomy, can tech boom benefit all Detroiters?

Sep. 18, 2013

Left to right: John Covington, Chancellor, Education Achievement Authority of Michigan looks on as Hector Ruiz, Chairman, Advanced Nanotechnology Solutions, Inc. speaks on the panel Education 2.0 for Americans 2.0 at TECHONOMY Detroit hosted by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation at Wayne State University on Sept. 17, 2013. / Kathleen Galligan/Detroit Free Press

Written by

Detroit Free Press Business Writer

At this week’s Techonomy conference in Detroit, I led a panel discussion on a provocative question: Would the technology boom now enlivening downtown and Midtown do much, if anything, for Detroit’s neighborhoods?

Put another way, will the new digital entrepreneurs filling up the greater downtown area transfer their skills and expertise to the hundreds of thousands of mostly poor residents of the city? Or are we just creating an elite cadre of mostly young, white specialists downtown? If so, that would just worsen our digital divide, the gulf between middle-class comfort with smart phones and tablets and the virtual absence of smart technology in many of the city’s homes.

Clearly, the need is great. As my fellow panelists — such as Catherine Kelly, publisher of the Michigan Citizen, and Brandon Jessup, CEO of the Michigan Forward public policy consultancy — said, the sort of tech-savvy folks who made up Techonomy’s audience this week contrasted sharply with tech-deprived residents living just a mile or so away from the Wayne State campus where we met.

But we came to no clear conclusion on how to solve the problem, or even what the problem was. Does getting technology into the neighborhoods mean getting tablet devices and smartphones into the hands of all schoolchildren? Or does it mean fitting out Detroit with the latest wireless connectivity (at a great cost, no doubt)?

As Matt Clayson, director of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, pointed out, sometimes cell phone reception is pretty bad along Detroit’s riverfront. Cell phone operators don’t want to locate cell towers near the international border for fear of serving nonpayers in Canada. So in some places along the river, either there is poor connection or you pay roaming charges for using a Windsor-based cell tower.

(Page 2 of 2)

We agreed that technology must mean more than just smartphones. Brian Mulloy, a web and software entrepreneur who recently moved back to his hometown of Detroit from the Silicon Valley, is a leader in the maker movement. With other enthusiasts, he tries to create hubs of maker technology — 3-D printers and the like — so that ordinary citizens can create their own tools and technology in the neighborhoods.

Such maker technology can be extremely cheap or cost millions of dollars, depending on the level of sophistication. For Detroit’s burgeoning urban farming movement, the simplest maker hubs can offer a low-cost way to obtain many of the tools that community gardeners need, from digging implements to chicken coops.

The role of education came up throughout the daylong Techonomy conference on Tuesday. Can companies sponsor internships and in-school programs to give students the tech skills they need to get jobs after graduation? Clearly, there’s greater need for that sort of thing, as one statistic offered at Techonomy indicated: Only about 15% of graduates from four-year U.S. colleges get tech jobs, compared to more than 40% in some nations overseas.

Perhaps Detroit’s fastest gain from new investment in technology would simply mean wiring city government so citizens could interact with their government online. Detroit’s city hall is notoriously inefficient when it comes to paying tax bills and the like. Maybe something as simple as getting the latest smart tech into city hall — and training workers to use it — could deliver the most immediate results.

If we reached no firm conclusions, we did agree Detroit’s tech boom has a long way to go before it benefits everybody, rich and poor alike.

It called to mind a remark made by a British economic development official a couple years ago during a visit I made to Manchester, England. Manchester, too, was trying to upgrade its tech profile, including wiring the entire city for 4G technology so that entrepreneurs could connect to the world. Using a quaint British expression, the official told me that if Manchester failed to achieve that goal of total tech connectivity, “we’re stuffed.”